Lecture 21: Elizabethan England, Puritans, Country Food

Elizabethan England, Puritans, Country Food................................

Lecture 21

I

n this lecture, you will learn that England has had a very rich and varied

culinary past—one in which there was a constant battle between native

and continental fashions and country and courtly cooking. This had a lot

to do with their religious situation, being Protestant but with both Puritan

and Catholic minorities, and their political development as a constitutional

monarchy with a powerful landed nobility and gentry. At times, courtly

and continental fashions dominated, and at others, simple country tastes

prevailed. Sometimes, narrow nationalism made them shun the strange and

foreign, and at other times, they went mad for imported oddities.

England in the 16th Century

 England in the 16th century was also one of the new powerful nation-

states with a strong solvent monarchy. It, too, had a Reformation,

but unlike the bloody civil wars in France, England under Henry

VIII broke away from Rome peacefully. The Reformation in

England took place in Parliament, which gave that body a measure

of power unlike the rest of Europe. The nature of shared power

made England’s culinary heritage unique because patronage and

power was not centered only at court.

 One perhaps unexpected outcome of the Reformation was the

dissolution of the monasteries, so many of their functions—such

as keeping bees for wax, growing grapes for sacramental wine,

and tending herb gardens—came to an end. Those monastic

properties were sold to private individuals, people with their own

independent power.

 We know something about the cuisine of Henry’s reign partly

through the accounts of banquets thrown by his principal minister,

Cardinal Wolsey. These lavish affairs were often set up in

“banquetting houses,” and the food was still thoroughly medieval,

involving huge wild animals served with spicy sauces.